Their Own Devices

Mission 11

Berry dies, infops under attack

24

JUN/14

The team gradually sweep through the remainder of the base, encountering a few modified chimpanzees that they put down easily through the assistance of their potent magical devices created by messrs Heckler and Koch.

Berry is isolated with the hostages in the device labs at the rear of the compound. After Freddie breaks the basic security that Berry had hacked into the door interface, they make a tactical entry and shoot Dr Berry until he falls down and doesn’t get up again. Perhaps a little more for good measure.

Fortunately, only one hostage has been killed at this point, and KD, Aaron, and Freddie manage to safely disable the booby traps that Berry left behind.

The base is handed over to Clarion and the containment crew to clean up, the victorious response squad rides a chopper back to home base at Fort Halstead.

A couple of days later, Freddie is chatting to Li-li while idly monitoring the security feeds through Hal, and she mentions that InfOps HQ has been under sustained DDOS and other hacking attempts for the last two weeks. Their security AI has managed to prevent compromise of anything sensitive. They suspect the culprits are mostly Anonymous opportunists, but with the help of a more secretive and dangerous new black hat group that they are struggling to identify.

Which is not too unusual in itself, but what happens next is entirely unique. Halstead itself comes under attack, both physically and digitally.

A hacker attempts to subvert Halsteads perimeter defenses, and Freddie assists in mostly fighting off the incursion. They don’t have complete control of the above ground defense though.

The exterior forces are two goons with g36 assault rifles, and a compromised Halstead turret. They have been engaging the QinetiQ security forces in a gun battle, and mostly doing OK at it. QinetiQ will open fire on the players if they engage without clarifying who they are first. Many civilian QinetiQ contractors are within the area of combat.

Freddie is assisting to fight off the incursion, and this takes the form of a cybermantic encounter in which Freddie and Upton, with Halstead, attempt to backtrack the attack to identify the attackers.